our society seems to hinge. In his RSA lecture on Sunday, he’ll make an appeal for a new global financial architecture based on a better balance between the market and the state, and between means and ends. Quite simply a titan of the economics realm, professor at Columbia and a leading critic of deregulation, Stiglitz isn’t one to mince his words, making him such a popular Charlotte Square returnee. With a gloomy economic forecast for the foreseeable future, there has been no better time to mend our ways, and he’s just the man to tell us how. (Peggy Hughes) ■ 21 Aug, 6.30pm; 22 Aug, 3pm, £10 (£8).
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face in public or even cover their hair’, she decided to spend one day wearing the niqab, along the way drawing responses from curiosity to abuse. ‘I feel that more often than not, it is used as a political statement, to identify a woman as a Muslim in a global climate where Muslims feel that they are under attack.’ So how does she believe this should
be addressed, both for Muslims and non-Muslims? ‘I’m all for different ways to support and promote a non- radical version of Islam whether that be through film, fashion, books,
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comedy etc. Islam has been misrepresented for many years and we need to find creative ways to reclaim our faith.’ This was the reason Malik put some humour into her book, We’re a Muslim, Please. ‘I didn’t want it to be an academic script or alien to the readers. A minority of people have managed to give a very warped version of my faith; many of the concepts which extremists talk about are as alien to me as they are to non- Muslims and it’s vital that the majority become more vocal and active in countering this view.’ (Kate Gould) ■ 22 Aug, 4.30pm, £7 (£5).
JOSEPH STIGLITZ Helping us mend our economic ways
Can money make us happy? This timeless question, made all the more pressing by the brassic ‘financial climate’ we’re shivering through at the moment, is to be addressed by celebrated thinkers in the Meaning of Money strand at this year’s Book Festival, headed up by Joseph Stiglitz. In 2000, the then Chief Economist at the World Bank was fired for criticising the US Government’s handling of the 1997 Asian financial crisis. Undeterred, he believes the current recession, and the disaster following in its wake, is underpinned by a moral deficit, a Bacchanalian abandonment of reason to the gods of materialism.
On Saturday, he’ll challenge an audience to consider new alternatives to the defining framework of materialism, upon which every facet of
Anna Politkovskaya Event The Book Festival is aiming to mark the work of the assassinated Russian journalist every year and in 2010, Charlotte Square Gardens
opens its doors to Arch Tait, who translated her books, and Masha Karp, the London-based journo who works with the Beeb’s Russian Service. Both will discuss Politkovskaya’s ideas and the legacy she has left behind her. ■ 22 Aug, 5pm, £10 (£8).
Festival Books TOP5 TV PEOPLE
A set of small screen heroes gather up to chew some telly fat
Stephen Poliakoff In an age when the ‘TV dramatist’ no longer has the kudos of, say, a regional weather girl or the host of a reality TV late-night spin-off show, Poliakoff is still the man that the BBC will call on when they want an elegant piece of authored drama. Down the years he’s give us Shooting the Past, Gideon’s Daughter (pictured) and The Lost Prince, while he recently returned to the film fold with Glorious 39, the tale of a family and a nation at war. 23 Aug, 8.30pm, £10 (£8).
Nicholas Parsons It is to his eternal credit that Parsons is still going pretty strong at his not so tender age. He seemed like a telly veteran back in the 70s when he was coming ‘live from Norwich’ to present the iconic ITV quiz show, Sale of the Century. Since then he’s become a radio star by hosting Just a Minute and is now into a full decade of his Happy Hour chat show on the Fringe. 19 Aug, 8pm, £10 (£8). Elaine C Smith She might be best known for her role as Rab C’s world-weary wife, Mary Doll, but Smith has had a varied and colourful career as a respected Scottish actress and campaigner. In her memoir, Nothing Like a Dame, she recounts her long struggle to make it in a male-dominated, working-class country at a time when women were supposed to just shut up and stay thin, especially in the blokey worlds of theatre and television. 24 Aug, 1.30pm, £10 (£8).
Niall Ferguson The Glasgow- born historian has emerged from behind books such as Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire and The Pity of War to front an intoxicating Channel 4 documentary series, The Ascent of Money, a detailed account of ‘moolah’ from the Incas to the credit crunch. 25 Aug, 6.30pm, £10 (£8).
John Simpson One of the country’s best loved world affairs reporters, Simpson is of the belief that the ‘news’ does not necessarily equate with the ‘truth’, it merely reports certain aspects of an event. Here, he will chat about the way in which news stories can be manipulated by the press. 26 Aug, 8pm, £10 (£8). (Brian Donaldson)
19–26 Aug 2010 THE LIST 25